What Are Trump’s Advisers Saying Behind Closed Doors?

In the future, Donald Trump’s advisers, including John Kelly, the chief of staff, will likely have a lot to say about the President’s time in office.

Photograph by Drew Angerer / Getty

Someday, when all that’s been happening has receded into the
semi-distant past, historians may be able to answer a fascinating
question: What were the people who worked for Donald Trump, the nation’s
forty-fifth President, really saying to one another?

It’s no secret that some of those people closest to Trump—close, that is, in the ways of Washington, though not
necessarily close in a personal way—are deeply worried about the nation,
and torn, if that’s the word, between duty to country and a tug of
loyalty to the man who appointed them to their posts. When, following
the wrenching events in Charlottesville, the President expressed a
strange tolerance for
neo-Nazis,
a glance at the bowed head of the White House chief of staff, John
Kelly, revealed an attitude of sadness and bafflement. At the same
event, Gary Cohn, the former Goldman Sachs president and Trump’s chief
economic adviser, who is Jewish, looked miserable and was
said to be
“disgusted” and “upset,” ready to bolt. Along with Defense Secretary
James Mattis, national-security adviser H. R. McMaster, Secretary of
State Rex Tillerson, and several others, Kelly and Cohn seem like pillars of
sanity in a time of chaos, a growing contrast to an unmoored President.

As for what Mattis, Kelly, and the rest say to one another, it doesn’t
take much to imagine that the most pressing topic has been “What are we
going to do with this fellow?” It is to be hoped, for history’s sake,
that they’re keeping notes on their conversations, both formal and
social, recalling their honest discussions at private meals and even
remarks exchanged in washrooms. In time, there will be more to learn
from memoirs, although their quality will depend on the indiscretion,
the observational talent, and, particularly in the case of the recently
departed Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, the rage level of their
authors. The most interesting recollections might come from
Vice-President Mike Pence; his docility and dutiful fawning have left
his principles somewhat compromised, and his heartbeat-away status
forces him to be especially careful, even in the way that he looks at
his chief (that is, never askance). But he’s undoubtedly heard a lot.

While researching a book on the relationship between President Dwight
Eisenhower and his Vice-President, Richard Nixon, I came across the
substance of some extraordinary telephone conversations between Nixon
and John Foster Dulles, then the Secretary of State, wondering what
would need to be done if Eisenhower, who had suffered a minor stroke in
late November, 1957, were no longer able to perform his duties. Dulles
thought that they were liable to face a situation in which the President
would be incapable of acting, without recognizing his own incapacity. Nixon
worried, too, that Eisenhower’s judgment might no longer be sound and
that no one around him “would be able to exercise judgment or control.”
At one point, when Eisenhower seemed worrisomely energetic, Dulles
telephoned the President’s doctor to ask if there might be a way to
“control him medically.” Eisenhower, though, made a rapid recovery;
there was no need for extra-constitutional improvisation.

Trump, in the manic seven months since his Inauguration, has lacked the
essential quality of Presidential leadership, which is to be able to
hold the trust, respect, and confidence of a majority of Americans; its
absence now casts doubt over any decision he makes. The same doubts
plagued President Nixon, forty-three years ago, amid the final crisis in
the Watergate scandal: the release of a tape on which he was heard
trying to shut down an F.B.I. investigation—a clear obstruction of
justice. (That “was the final blow, the final nail in the coffin,
although you don’t need another nail if you’re already in the coffin,
which we were,” he later told his aide Frank Gannon.)

Nixon was losing not only the confidence of the nation but also of his essential
constituencies, and much the same seems to be happening to Trump. The people who have recently distanced themselves from the President include Tennessee’s Senator Bob Corker, the chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations, who was previously on a short list for Secretary of State, and who last week said, “The President has not yet been able to demonstrate the stability nor
some of the competence that he needs to demonstrate in order to be
successful”; the business leaders on two now-defunct Presidential advisory councils,
who had begun to resign just before Trump dissolved the panels; and the
chiefs of all four military services, who spoke out against racism following Trump’s divisive remarks after Charlottesville.

When Senator Barry Goldwater and a senatorial delegation informed Nixon,
in August of 1974, that his Presidency was over, Nixon, a rational man,
attuned to history and politics, was wise enough to agree, though not
without suffering. It’s not far-fetched to wonder if the investigations
being led by the special counsel Robert Mueller—starting with Russian
interference and possible collusion in the 2016 election, but, as my
colleague Adam Davidson recently wrote, very likely extending into
Trump’s finances—might
put the President in equally serious legal jeopardy. If so, which
Republican leaders would have the authority, and the stature, to carry a
“Goldwater message” to Donald Trump? And if it were delivered, how would
he react?

Jeffrey Frank, a senior editor at The New Yorker from 1995 to 2009, is a regular contributor to newyorker.com.